Researcher develops enhanced electronic cooling technique

A North Carolina (NC) State University researcher has developed what is claimed to be a more efficient, less expensive way of cooling electronic devices.

The new technique is said to be particularly applicable to devices that generate a lot of heat, such as lasers and power devices.

According to a statement, the technique uses a so-called ‘heat spreader’ made of a copper-graphene composite, which is attached to the electronic device using an indium-graphene interface film.

‘Both the copper-graphene and indium-graphene have higher thermal conductivity, allowing the device to cool efficiently,’ said Dr Jag Kasichainula, an associate professor of materials science and engineering at NC State and author of a paper on the research.

Kasichainula found that the copper-graphene film’s thermal conductivity allows it to cool approximately 25 per cent faster than pure copper, which is what most devices currently use.

Dissipating heat from electronic devices is important, because the devices become unreliable when they become too hot.

The paper lays out the manufacturing process for creating the copper-graphene composite, using an electrochemical deposition process.

‘The copper-graphene composite is also low cost and easy to produce,’ said Kasichainula. ‘Copper is expensive, so replacing some of the copper with graphene actually lowers the overall cost.’

Very interesting, though considering how much information is in that paper, could you not have expanded this article to include more of it? That 25% figure is at 250K(-23C) when it has a thermal conductivity of 510W/m.K. At 300K(27C) it is 460 W/m.K, ~15% better, and at 350K(77C) it is 440W/m.K, ~10% better than that of copper. However, this is still a fairly limited temperature range, and they state they still have room for improvement in the form of reducing the size of the graphene platelets to consistently below 3 atomic layers thick.

The electrochemical deposition process introduces impurities into the copper, so instead of being ~401W/m.K as it would be in an ideal state, its value is reduced to 380W/m.K at 300K(27C).

Is there anything approaching a cost analysis for the potential cost reductions in manufacturing when compared with copper alone?